OLD AND NEW IDEAS OF CREATION 9

numerous examples carefully collected from all branches
of the animal and vegetable kingdoms become so many
evidences that Creation is unthinkable. And most of
his contemporaries preferred to be illogical, anyway.
He seems to have had no disciples, and no subsequent
thinker can be called an "omphalist." Yet omphalism
might well have been adapted, at a later time, to recon-
cile evolution with creation. Even Gosse, though in
one place he asserts the immutability of species, shows
elsewhere a tentative approval of Evolution : —

" If we could take a sufficiently large view of the whole plan
of nature . . . should we be able to trace the same sort of rela-
tion between . . . Elephas Indicus and Elephas primigenius t as
subsists between the leaves of 1857 and the leaves of 1856; or
between the oak now flourishing in Sherwood Forest and that of
Robin Hood's day, from whose acorn it sprang? I dare not
say, we should; though I think it highly probable. But I think
you will not dare to say, we should not.

It may be objected that Elephas primigenius is absolutely dis-
tinct from E. Indicus. I answer, Yes, specifically distinct; and
so am I distinct from my father, individually distinct. But as
individual distinctness does not preclude the individual from being
the exponent of a circular revolution in the life-history of the
species, so specific distinctness may not preclude the species from
being the exponent of a circular revolution in some higher, un-
named, life-history " (pp. 343-344).

Why should an Omphalist suppose that the single
act of Creation needed to be supplemented by a series
of ideal creations? Gosse thus describes his conception
of Adam : —

" . . . the new-created Man was, at the first moment of his
existence, a man of twenty, or five-and-twenty, or thirty years old
[Sir Thomas Browne argued for 50 or 60]; physically, palpably,
visibly, so old. ... He appeared precisely what he would
have appeared had he lived so many years " (pp. 351-2).

But it should surely be added: "under healthy,
normal conditions." If we imagine a medical man of
to-day examining the newly-created Adam, and certify-